My impression wasn't so much "opaque" as it was "dreadfully, soul-suckingly bureaucratic". It's been a long time since I looked, so this may have improved since, but it was really hard to figure out what the first step towards helping with packaging is (aside from the triage/testing side).
We release a new version of an operating system that is used by millions of users around the world - twice a year. So there's definitely some rules to ensured quality. And if anything end-users want more quality, as seen from some of the complaints about bugs in this thread!
So there's definitely a community and it takes time to learn the rules. But there's lots of ways to get involved and if you take the time to understand the issues and then have ideas on how to improve the processes you'll be listened to - Ubuntu is ultimately a community.
